Love Lost & Found in NYC

Can a city save me?

I have conquered the AirTrain from JFK and now only need to pay $11.80 to get into the city when I visit. Most of the time I understand the subway. I’m naturally a speedy walker, so no issues there. I learned the hard way that you need to carry everything you need for the day on your person, because it’s wildly inconvenient to backtrack once you’re out and about. I have a theory that this makes New Yorkers uniquely alluring, because they’re carrying the spirit of the entire day with them.

Sometime during the part of Covid where it seemed like it was coming to a close but actually, a variant was about to rear its head once again, I visited some friends in New York who’d just moved to various parts of Brooklyn. The seed was planted. What if…I…lived here? Having been pretty isolated for over a year, I found the city’s energy electric. I wanted to be around people. I craved the spontaneity, walkability, public transit, and vibrancy.

I had a very magical long summer weekend in Brooklyn, traversing Prospect Park and Brooklyn Heights, and everyone was just…out. And about. You can bop from a wine bar to a housewarming party. Tiny dive bars had people pouring out onto the street. If all of these examples seem specifically party-related, it’s because at this time, I was absolutely positively CRAVING a party.

Covid isolation was having its way with me. Fortunately, I spent much of that time with my family. I am now especially thankful for this time together, and even consider it somewhat divine (my choice to relocate home that is, not the horrific pandemic). I did not know at the time that these would be my last years with my dad, with my family of 4 (5 including dog). My family made many cherished memories during this time, taking up tie-dying, going on leisurely boat rides, making picnics with farmers market produce bought at a distance, having movie nights, and dancing around the kitchen to my improvised Spotify DJ sets. I would not give this time up for anything in the world.

But of course, we missed fully living our lives. I missed people. I love people! My internal optimist thinks every time I leave the house is an opportunity to meet someone amazing.

That weekend in New York, watching all of these vibrant, dynamic people in such density, felt like a salve to the wounds of loneliness that Covid had inflicted. It was like a torch to my frozen life, which seemed to thaw as I laughed with strangers over canned seltzers on a rooftop at sunset.

So, I started toying with the alternate version of me. One who would change into her heels from her walking shoes (I pretty much never wear heels), who would dabble in the NYC comedy scene, who would live in a small space with perfectly curated minimalist necessities and never ever ever have clutter.

Maybe, I thought, the friction I had felt in my 20s living in LA really was location-based. Maybe New York would let me flow. Maybe if I moved, everything would click. Maybe I was meant to be there.

Then, in 2022, my dad was diagnosed with cancer (you probably know this by now). This was an unwelcome life shift, so you better believe I was not going to electively make another absolutely massive life shift. I also started splitting time between LA, Atlanta and Houston, where he was being treated. I think if I became any more uprooted I would have flown away, cow from the Wizard of Oz-style.

I spent day after day in a hospital room under a mandate of covid precaution. This entailed signing in at the hospital, getting my temperature checked, switching out my mask for a hospital mask, double masking, walking up to my dad’s floor, getting my temperature re-checked, and going into a hospital room that needed to be as sterile as possible, all the while haunted by the fact that I could be asymptomatic. I could be carrying the strain that would harm my dad, or worse, and not even know it.

There was no popping out for a quick errand or reprieve at the local coffee shop. It took 20 minutes just to get in and out of the building. And once you were out, you were out. There was no flow of traffic to and fro on the transplant floor. Under the best of circumstances, transplant floors need to be kept safe and sterile. Under global pandemic circumstances? It’s nothing short of a pressure cooker.

My imagination wandered. My imagination moved me to New York. Maybe New York would save me. Make me everything I needed to be to meet this impossible moment. Give me a life so exciting that sadness would not reach me. New York City became emblematic of the radical opposite of the life I was living.

Because it wasn’t just the big life things I missed. Of course I missed going to restaurants with friends, going to the movies, and oh, I don’t know, breathing air without fear. But I also missed all the in between moments, all the possibilities. The things that might never really be but the whisper of them flits by. Making eye contact with a cute stranger. Getting the giggles with my friends so much that my stomach hurts. A last minute changes of plans. Live theater, looking out into an audience. Being invited to a house party where I only know a few people. The idle chit chat in line for coffee. Petting strangers dogs. The anticipation of what may happen when I step outside. New York held these experiences in droves.

The only slight hitch in my New York fantasy? As George Strait once sang, all my ex’s live in NYC. Kidding! George Strait said Texas, of course. Unfortunately, I am not kidding that a weirdly high proportion of my ex-whatevers reside in NYC. And look, it’s a big city, one of the most populous by far. But I can’t deny the specter of my lost loves looms.

What does this have to do with the rest of this essay? Kinda nothing. But also kinda my search to find and understand love in all its forms in undying and transcendent, so.

My first love lives in NYC. We have not seen each other since we were 22 and I looked at him hauntingly across a lawn at graduation after greeting his parents, who I actually quite liked. When I was 24 I texted him the lyrics to Jumper while I was out at LPR in Greenwich Village for a birthday party he was supposed to attend. I guess I couldn’t just revel in my good fortune that he hadn’t shown up, and instead forced the issue by sending him an absolutely unintelligible excerpt of Third Eye Blind lyrics. To be honest with you, I can’t remember what his response was, if I even got one. But somehow dancing to a 90s cover band and sending an inarguably insane text to my first love, my first everything, who had devastated me so greatly by holding all my love but not measuring up to the care that love necessitates, was the step I needed to take to really let go.

When we were still dating, I told him that I thought a little part of me would always love him, no matter what happened to us. I’m surprised I was that prescient at 19. I actually had hoped, after we broke up, that I was wrong about this.

It turns out I was right. I do think everyone I truly loved lives in a little place in my heart. It’s often not ideal, but it is honest. And it is life, which rarely makes sense.

My longest love also lives in NYC. He was a sparring partner with my heart for close to a decade. Yes, I am also groaning. That is too damn long for limbo!

And then, I have a smattering* of men who I suppose fall into the category of “we barely dated but I probably wrote at least one poem about you” who also live in NYC. I will jump a mile if I happen to be in their neighborhoods and see someone with the same hair color, but ultimately, I think what I miss about them is the adrenaline-filled meet cute we shared that can only be possible in a city like New York.

The jigsaw puzzle of former beaus mostly sits idle until I walk down the wrong street, or hear the wrong song. And then something rattles loose. In some ways, the lost loves that occupy the city remind me of everything I’m not, of everything I couldn’t make work.

But then I think, what is the one thing that outweighs love lost? Well, it’s love, of course. Persistent, evolving, dynamic love. Fortunately for me, some of the people I love most in the world, who love me best, also live in New York.

My friends who have listened to me cry in public parks, who have sent me books about signs from the universe, who buy me croissants and inflate their air mattress for me, who bring me to vegetarian restaurants they know I will love, who help me dream, who give me a safe place to land. They are the people who make the jigsaw puzzle make sense.

Alas, I did not move to New York. I realized what I was seeking was less about physical location and more that I was looking for connection, adrenaline, and a quick fix to life’s mysteries. And one day, while I was enjoying my favorite hike just a few minutes from my Los Angeles home, sending songs to my best friends on the east coast, I realized: I already have what I was looking for.

I am so thankful for all the ways NYC has pushed me and created magic in my life. And I’ll never say never. But for now, I am addressing the mysteries by being just a little more present, a little more open, and looking into the faces of the ones I love.

*smattering? More like 1, maybe 2, if I’m being real.